The just-concluded Presidents Day holiday was, if anything, even more distanced from any sense of purpose than in previous years. Save for a few faint, half-hearted tributes to Abraham Lincoln, the three-day weekend passed with hardly a whimper,...

Thoughts and prayers. Deal with the mentally ill. Get criminals off the streets. But don’t touch our sacred guns. Because, dontcha know, guns don’t kill people; people kill people. You would think that even gun-toting S...

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Editorials

More bluster from the Trump administration or another skirmish in the “war” between Washington and California? We should know soon whether state and local sanctuary laws will provoke an immigration sweep that could affect Santa Cruz County, among other Northern and Central California areas. While we wouldn’t put anything past the current federal regime, we hope that a harsh crackdown on undocumented immigrants seems is just an empty threat. But it...

|on 01/20/2018

Editorials

Imagine what kind of panic would ensue if Californians received the following text alert: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO CALIFORNIA. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. Hawaiians, as we all know, had to live through a frightening 38 minutes Saturday trying to figure out what to do — find some kind of shelter, pray, jump in the ocean, whatever — in the face of their state government telling them they faced a fiery death within a matter of...

|on 01/16/2018

Editorials

Consider how two prominent women reacted to the latest outrage by President Donald Trump. “Why do we want all these people from ‘shithole countries’ coming here?” said the leader of the free world, while presiding over an Oval Office meeting on immigration reform. Trump made his already infamous comment after Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin was explaining to him a proposal to end the visa lottery in exchange for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for...

|on 01/13/2018

Editorials

President Trump’s order that 200,000 Salvadoran refugees leave the United States by September 2019 after living here legally for nearly 20 years is mean-spirited in the extreme. It will make America a weaker and literally a poorer nation: 95 percent of these residents have jobs, and many run their own small businesses, employing others. They are the opposite of a drain on the U.S. economy. In California, 50,000 would be ripped from the fabric of communities they thought...

|on 01/11/2018

Editorials

The housing crisis in California is spurring another round of advocacy for rent control. With rents having reached heights making even one bedroom apartments unaffordable to many working residents, it seems like a logical and workable solution. That is, if you believe government regulation can solve housing affordability issues and transcend market economics. Make no mistake, however, the high cost of housing already has shifted the debate on rent control. This week,...

|on 01/09/2018

Editorials

As almost always with Trump administration directives, it’s probably best to take a deep breath before hyperventilating. The two broadsides at blue states that came out late last week — marijuana and offshore oil drilling — were part of our cheeseburger eating president’s ongoing war against states — California! — that didn’t support him in the 2016 election. So what else is new? In the former directive, Attorney General...

|on 01/06/2018

Editorials

You mean there are more new state laws taking effect this month than the one legalizing pot, which California has spent the last half-century putting hundreds of thousands of its citizens in the slammer for? Yes, Virginia, there are more. Over 100 more. Perhaps none as sexy — or maybe that’s stoner-y — as the one that rescinds century-old prohibitions on cannabis, allowing sale and possession for recreational use of up to one ounce of the formerly noxious...

|on 01/04/2018

Editorials

Here we go again on taxes. California voters in all likelihood will get the pleasure of revisiting property tax limiting Proposition 13 in not one, but two initiatives this year. The most far reaching was filed last month with the state attorney general’s office and seeks to raise $11 billion a year by removing Prop. 13 protections from industrial and commercial properties then reassessing them based on rising real estate values. The initiative, known as “The...

|on 01/02/2018

Editorials

Had enough of 2017? So, in the spirit of trusting things will get better, let’s look forward to 2018. Locally, our hope, but not our prediction, is that housing prices will moderate, that rentals will somehow become plentiful and that people who live here will be able to find housing with something less than six-figure-plus incomes. As always, we also wish for progress on the longstanding issue of the homeless — how to be compassionate toward the needy while...

|on 12/30/2017

Editorials

On Monday, the will of California voters to legalize recreational use of marijuana will be carried out. Sort of. In some places. By some people. With lots of rules and regulations. With just a few days ago until 2018, how this will play out, locally, statewide and nationally remains up in smoke as California’s adult-use cannabis retail stores are set to open. After voters approved Proposition 64 last year, the state launched into a regulatory process to get ready to...